Monday, October 27, 2014

After the trouncing we gave Labour in Gateshead in the local elections in May, Gateshead Lib Dems have now won an award from the North East regional party. Labour had assumed they would win all but one of our seats on the council. Their campaign was a flop. They gained none of our seats and came close to losing one of theirs to us.

The award was announced on Saturday at the regional conference, held at the Jurys Inn hotel on the Gateshead Quays. Former Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Moore, presented the award.

Friday, October 24, 2014

A chieftan tank has been parked outside the Vickers tank factory in Scotswood, Newcastle for years but Vickers recently wanted rid of it. They offered it to Tyne and Wear Museums (I am a member of the the Museums and Archives Committee) and we agreed to accept it and relocate it to the car park of the Discovery Museum. Some people impress the neighbours with an expensive, flash car on the drive. We now have a chieftan tank though sadly without an engine (or ammunition!) The move took place on Wednesday and it involved lifting the tank onto a gigantic lorry. Shuffling it into the Discovery car park was something to be experienced.

The latest edition of our monthly email newsletter was published last night via Mailchimp. This edition leads with the latest on Labour's greenbelt building plans but also features some of the work being done by volunteers (and Lib Dem councillors) on planting and maintaining up flower beds and verges in the area. Lots of other news as well. You can read the newsletter here.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Some years ago, when I worked in London, I used to write a blog post on the train to London each Monday morning, hence the unimaginative title I used of "The Monday Morning Blog". It was a title that warned that I was about to blow off about something political. It's now five years since I wrote a "Monday Morning Blog" but I thought I'd reintroduce it. I won't of course, be sitting on a train when I write it. Instead I'll bash it out on my laptop at home, in between feeding my goats and heading to Hexham to get the coming month's supply of fodder for my livestock.

Today I am looking back at Lib Dem Conference last week, or rather, why I wasn't able to get there. I had booked a weekend pass and had hoped to go up to Glasgow on the Saturday morning and return on the Sunday evening. What got in the way of these political travel plans was my new goat Pinkie and the local history society.

We got Pinkie at the end of August. She is out first milking goat. In our roadmap to becoming self-sufficient, getting a milking goat was a key milestone. Until we had one, we would have a large hole in our self-sufficiency diet, filled by trips to the dairy section of the supermarket. I'm pleased to say those trips have now ended. Pinkie provides us with 2.5 litres of milk a day. We are not yet at the point where we are bathing in the stuff, but our milk lake is growing and cheese-making, yoghurt-making, soap-making etc are on the agenda. The need to milk Pinkie on the weekend of Conference meant I was staying in Gateshead rather than travelling to Glasgow.

The second reason for not going to Conference was the decision of Sunniside History Society to invite me to be their guest speaker at their monthly gathering on Tuesday 7th October. I chose as my subject "The Good Food Guide to Medieval Sunniside". The talk was actually about what medieval Sunniside and the surrounding area would have looked like in the 1340s as well as what people ate in the medieval period. Landscape and diet were closely linked then as people were largely self-sufficient. The talk seemed to go down well but it required a huge amount of research and long walks around the area to take hundreds of photos. Conference therefore had to give way to medieval food, village duckponds and feudal community ovens.

Had I been at Conference, I would have been tempted to say something about the daft decision to lock out any further airport runways in the South East of England. It seems that many in the party have simply not learnt the lesson of tuition fees. Personally, I thought the suggestion that Gatwick should be expanded was a bit wet but was nevertheless a suitable compromise. My preference is for a 3rd runway at Heathrow.

Those opposed to a 3rd Heathrow runway claim such a development is environmentally damaging. My argument is that not building an additional runway is even more environmentally damaging. When I am at my house in South East London I can see dozens of aircraft at any time through the day circling over London waiting for their landing slots to become available at congested Heathrow. The amount of pollution from these aircraft is incredible. When flying low and slow, they drink fuel at an alarming rate for no appreciable benefit.

If the anti-runway policy makes it into the manifesto, and we are in Coalition with either of the other parties after the general election, the ghost of over-my-dead-body decisions will come back to haunt us.